Geometry in Painting: A Visual Language of Ritual
- jessica moritz
- Apr 17
- 2 min read
Why I Use Geometry in Painting: A Visual Language of Ritual
In a world swollen with noise, geometry is my silence.
It doesn't shout for attention or demand an explanation. It simply holds.
When language fails ; when words unravel into static ; I return to form. Line. Shape. Rhythm. Geometry becomes the thread I follow through the labyrinth.
For me, it’s not about cold logic or perfect symmetry. It’s about grounding. And survival.
Ritual in Repetition
There’s a quiet ceremony in painting.
In each composition, forms return, not to repeat, but to evolve. These repetitions are not decoration. They’re rituals. They anchor me in the present while pulling threads from memory and sensation.
In this way, painting becomes a practice, breathwork, or marking time. Each line is deliberate, and each edge negotiates space. My studio becomes a space of ritual through rhythm and structure.
Not to control chaos, but to meet it.
Shapes Speak
People often assume geometry is sterile. I’ve never understood that.
A square can hold grief. A triangle can ache. A single curve can whisper comfort or dissonance. These aren’t abstract ideas to me: They stand before me and will remain after me. Geometry is simply the shape that emotion takes when language is no longer enough.
My lines carry stories. Stories I don’t always want to explain. Sometimes even I don’t know what they say until much later. The work is smarter than me, more honest, and detached from fitting social standards.
A Cultural Memory
I paint from within a lineage: not just of art, but of identity.
As a Jewish artist, I see structure not only as aesthetic but as cultural memory. We have always encoded survival in architecture, language, and pattern. From sacred geometry to ritual order, our visual culture has been one of translation, making sense of fragmentation.
In this context, geometry is more than a tool. It is an inheritance. A memory carried in form. A way of saying we are still here, even in abstraction.
Mapping the Interior
Each painting is a kind of map, not of geography, but of interiority.
A record of how I felt, what I searched for, how I moved through that particular period.
Sometimes the lines are clean and confident. Sometimes they hesitate, break, and correct themselves. That’s part of the language, too. It doesn’t always speak in answers.
But it does speak.
The Work Speaks First
I don’t make work to explain it. I make it because it insists on existing.
But when I take a step back, I see the logic beneath the layers; a personal grammar built from color, form, and absence. Geometry becomes not just structure but syntax, not just design but devotion.
And that’s why I keep painting. Not for resolution. But for rhythm.
For ritual. For presence.
Consciously or not, as an artist we build.
It may be a legacy, an imaginary world, or a stack on canvas; we build an alternative vision of what we experience. It may look like a dot in a long line, an abstract reflection on society, current struggles, or human evolution.
Eventually, it will have an impact on some people in the short term, Eventually, it will reach someone.
And if we’re lucky, it will ripple outward and shape something new.
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